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Quit smoking for good: Brilliant little ideas to kick the habit
Actions du livre
Commencer à lire- Éditeur:
- Infinite Ideas
- Sortie:
- Dec 14, 2011
- ISBN:
- 9781908189981
- Format:
- Livre
Description
Informations sur le livre
Quit smoking for good: Brilliant little ideas to kick the habit
Description
- Éditeur:
- Infinite Ideas
- Sortie:
- Dec 14, 2011
- ISBN:
- 9781908189981
- Format:
- Livre
À propos de l'auteur
En rapport avec Quit smoking for good
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Quit smoking for good - Infinite Ideas
Introduction
If you continue to smoke throughout your adult life, there’s a one in two chance that the grim reaper will take you away with a smoking-related illness or condition. Whatever pleasure you might get from smoking, those are not odds worth gambling on.
Having established what people enjoy about smoking, our book moves on to the considerable benefits of stopping. Every smoker knows the damage done by this habit, but even we were surprised to find how extensive that damage is. You know that cigarettes make your teeth yellow, but are you aware of the damage they do to your gums? You know that smoking adds a few wrinkles to your features, but did you know that a sixty-year-old smoker has the body of someone seven years older? These and other discoveries add up and are worth talking about.
Mostly, however, the book is given over to ideas to help you give up, whether it’s joining a support group, using nicotine patches or other drugs, or going cold turkey. We’ve adopted and adapted ideas from all over the place. Some, like our suggestion for smashing up your ashtrays, are enormous fun; others, like giving money to a cause you hate if you break a pledge to stop smoking, can be pretty hairy.
There are many books around offering to help you give up, but we believe Infinite Ideas’ concept is ideally suited to this subject. You will not find here a promise that if you read this book you will quit smoking. Nor are we offering a one-method-suits-all approach to giving up. Every smoker is different: what works for Fred Jones in the office may not work for Samantha Smith in the pub. Indeed, what might not have worked for Fred five years ago may now do the trick. People give up when they are ready and not a moment before. But the process can be nudged along with the suggestions, strategies and solutions you’ll find here. What we offer is a huge menu to browse over and from it you can select your own quitting cocktail.
1. Hail the weed
Feel free to smoke while you read this book. We should celebrate why smoking lights us up.
Let’s face it, we’re addicts, aren’t we? And now we can’t stop. Well, in truth, we can. Fifty years ago, three out of four people smoked. Today, it’s just one in four. So either a lot of people died young or lots of people quit. (Actually, it’s a bit of both.) Choose which you’d rather be – dead or an ex-smoker.
We’re not trying to terrify you – you know this anyway – but, just to remind ourselves what it’s about before we launch into all the different ways we can give up, let’s celebrate the cigarette.
Smoking is relaxing. Smoking helps you concentrate. Smoking keeps you awake. It also picks you up when you’re down, it calms you when you’re stressed and it finishes off a job well done, a good meal, the day, lovemaking. Most smokers will say that’s exactly what this wonder drug does.
And there’s more to enjoying cigarettes than just the chemical hit. Cigarettes, their packets and a glittering array of fashion accessories make smoking a designer’s paradise. On top of that, there’s the allure of the lighters, holders and cases. Even ashtrays can be works of ceramic excellence, or reminders of some favourite distant place or football team, conjuring up the good things in our life.
Smoking is truly the complete experience. Pity it kills you at the same time. So, as you prepare to stop, relish those last few days of smoking. Really look for all the pleasures it brings you – at the same time as listing all the negatives that come with it.
Here’s an idea for you
If you have a health problem visit your doctor immediately. It may not be that bad, and the doctor can put you in touch with the local smoking cessation group, who’ll support you while you stop. If it is serious the earlier you catch it, the better – not knowing is more worrying than knowing the worst.
Defining idea
‘It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.’
MARK TWAIN
Defining idea
‘[Cigarettes are] not legitimate articles of commerce, being wholly noxious and deleterious to health. Their use is always harmful.’
Tennessee Supreme Court (upholding a total ban on cigarettes, 1898)
2. Tobacco tribe
Persecuted smokers take comfort in numbers so giving up without alienating your smoker chums takes planning.
Smokers and non-smokers are members of different tribes. Smokers can identify abstainers as easily as if the words ‘sensible non-smoker’ were tattooed on their foreheads. Perhaps this is why non-smokers are never offered a cigarette. Although people do smoke in private, there is a huge social component to the habit.
One difficulty in giving up is the sense that one is letting the side down and moving in with the enemy. Instead of being a member of that cosy congregation outside the office for a smoke at the end of lunch you will be joining the smug disapprovers inside. You might be worried that once you give up you’ll be barred forever from the endearing intimacy that fellow puffers share. How can you bow out and still be in the tribe?
You can learn a lot from our mate Derek, a fifty-a-day man, who was never one to go on about giving up or even cutting down. One day he stopped. ‘I’m giving up for my little girl,’ he said. ‘It was her eighth birthday last week and I asked her what she wanted. She looked me straight in the eye and said she wanted me to quit smoking.’ He was so gob-smacked that he agreed at once, and nobody could condemn that.
Having a really good reason to give up is a great way of staying in with the in crowd. You could use assertiveness techniques and just say no, but spinning a killer yarn is more fun. Beware, though, that you can still lose mates if you bang on about how wonderful everything now tastes and how much fitter you feel. Ex-smokers can reek of something far worse than stale tobacco fumes: